The Shape of a Pocket

known portraits, the difference of quality is considerable. There were great master-craftsmen and there were provincial hacks. There were those who summarily performed a routine, and there were others (surprisingly many in fact) who offered hospitality to the soul of their client. Yet the pictorial choices open to the painter were minute; the prescribed form very strict. This is paradoxically why, before the greatest of them, one is aware of enormous painterly energy. The stakes were high, the margin narrow. And in art these are conditions which make for energy.
    I want now to consider just two actions. First, the act of a Fayum portrait being painted, and, secondly, the action of our looking at one today.
    Neither those who ordered the portraits, nor those who painted them, ever imagined their being seen by posterity. They were images destined to be buried, without a visible future.
    This meant that there was a special relationship between painter and sitter. The sitter had not yet become a
model
, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival. To paint was to name, and to be named was a guarantee of this continuity. *
    In other words, the Fayum painter was summoned not to make a portrait, as we have come to understand the term, but to register his client, a man or a woman, looking at him. It was the painter rather than the ‘model’ who submitted to being looked at. Each portrait he made began with this act of submission. We should consider these works not as portraits, but as paintings about the experience of being looked at by Aline, Flavian, Isarous, Claudine …
    The address, the approach is different from anything we find later in the history of portraits. Later ones were painted for posterity, offering evidence of the once living to future generations. Whilst still being painted, they were imagined in the past tense, and the painter, painting, addressed his sitter in the third person – either singular or plural.
He, She, They as I observed them.
This is why so many of them look old even when they are not.
    For the Fayum painter the situation was very different. He submitted to the look of the sitter, for whom he was Death’s painter or, perhaps more precisely, Eternity’s painter. And the sitter’s look, to which he submitted, addressed him in the second person singular. So that his reply – which was the act of painting – used the same personal pronoun:
Toi, Tu, Esy, Ty … who is here.
This in part explains their immediacy.
    Looking at these ‘portraits’ which were not destined for us, we find ourselves caught in the spell of a very special contractual intimacy. The contract may be hard for us to grasp, but the look speaks to us, particularly to us today.
    If the Fayum portraits had been unearthed earlier, during, say, the eighteenth century, they would, I believe, have been considered as little more than a curiosity. To a confident, expansive culture these little paintings on linen or wood would probably have seemed diffident, clumsy, cursory, repetitive, uninspired.
    The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive!
    Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.
    There is a second reason why the Fayum portraits speak today. This century, as has been pointed out many times, is
the
century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings.
    The sudden anguish of missing what is